Читать книгу The Fowl Twins - Eoin Colfer, Eoin Colfer, Оуэн Колфер - Страница 9

THE GNOME PROFESSOR DR JERBAL ARGON ONCE presented a theory, dubbed the Law of Diminishing Probabilities, to the fairy Psych Brotherhood. Argon’s law states that the more unusual the subjects involved in a conflict, the more improbable the resolution to that conflict will be. It is possibly the vaguest behavioural theory ever to make it into a journal, and it is really more of a notion than a law. But, in the case of the Fowl Twins’ first magical adventure, it would certainly prove to be accurate, as we will see from the hugely improbable finale to this tale.

The law’s requirements were certainly fulfilled, as this day was, without doubt, one for unusual individuals:

An immortalist duke …

A miniature troll …

And a set of fraternal human twins: the first a certified genius with a criminal leaning lurking in his prefrontal cortex, and the second possessed of a singular talent that has been hinted at but not fully explored as yet.

There are two additional unusual individuals still to join the tale. The nunterrogator, to whom we have already alluded, will presently make one of her trademark theatrical entrances. But the next unusual individual to join our cast of protagonists is more than simply unusual – she is biologically unique. And she made her appearance from above, hovering ten metres over Dalkey Island.

This unusual individual was Lower Elements Police Specialist Lazuli Heitz, who, five minutes earlier, entered the island’s airspace to complete a training manoeuvre in the Fowl safe zone. Usually such safe zones were in remote areas, but in rare cases where there was a special arrangement with the human occupants, a zone could be closer to civilisation and provide more of a challenge for the specialists. A case in point being Dalkey Island, where Artemis Fowl the Second, friend to the LEP, had guaranteed safe passage for fairies.

From a human perspective, Lazuli was unusual simply by virtue of being an invisible flying fairy, but, from a fairy perspective, LEP Specialist Heitz was unusual because she was a hybrid, that is to say a crossbreed. Hybrids are common enough among the fairy folk, especially since the families were forced into close quarters underground, but, even so, they are each and every one idiosyncratic, for all hybrids are as unique as snowflakes and the manifestation of their magical abilities is unpredictable.

In Lazuli Heitz’s case, her magic had resolutely refused to manifest itself in any shape or form. Lazuli’s particular category of hybrid was known as a pixel, that being a pixie–elf cross. There were other species in the ancestral DNA mix too, but pixie and elf accounted for over ninety-five per cent of her total number of nucleotides. And, even though both pixies and elves are magical creatures, not a single spark of power seemed to have survived the crossbreeding. In height, Specialist Heitz followed the pixie type at barely eighty centimetres tall, but her head adhered to the elfin model and was smaller than one might expect to see on a pixie’s shoulders, with the customary elfin sharp planes of cheekbone, jaw and pointed ear. This was enough to give her away as a hybrid to any fairy who cared to look. And, just in case there were any lingering doubt, Lazuli’s skin and eyes were the aquamarine blue of Atlantean pixies, but her hair was the fine flaxen blonde associated with Amazonian elves. Scattered across her neck and shoulders was a mottling of yellow arrowhead markings, which, according to palaeofatumologists, had once made Amazonian elves look like sunflowers to airborne predators.

Unless that elf is a hybrid with blue skin, Lazuli often thought, which ruins the effect.

All this palaeofatumological knowledge only meant one thing to Lazuli, and that was that her parents had probably met on holiday, which was about the sum total of her knowledge on that subject, apart from the fact that one or both of them had deserted her on the north corner of a public square, after which the orphanage administrator had named her Lazuli Heights.

‘I changed the spelling, and there you have it,’ the administrator had told her. ‘It’s my little game, which worked out well for you, not so much for Walter Kooler or Vishtar Restrume.’

The sprite administrator had a human streak and often made barbed remarks along the lines of: The lapis lazuli is a semi-precious stone. Semi-precious, hybrid. I think your parents must have been thinking along those lines, or you wouldn’t have ended up here.

The administrator chuckled drily at his own tasteless joke every single time he cracked it. Lazuli never even smiled.

It was exceedingly exasperating for a pixel not to possess the magical phenotypic trait, especially since her driving ambition was to achieve the rank of captain in the LEPrecon, a post where abilities such as the mesmer, invisibility and healing powers would most certainly prove to be boons. Fortunately for Heitz, her obdurate streak, sharp mind and dead eye with an oxalis pistol had so far carried her through two years of intense training in the LEP Academy and now to specialist duty in a safe zone. Lazuli did suspect that her Academy application might have been bolstered by the LEP’s minority-inclusion policy.

And Lazuli certainly was a minority. Her DNA profile breakdown was forty-two per cent elf, fifty-three per cent pixie and five per cent undeterminable. Unique.

The evening’s exercise was straightforward: fairies were secreted around the island, and it was her mission to track them down. These were not real fairies, of course. They were virtual avatars that could be tagged by passing a gloved hand through holograms projected by her helmet camera. There would be clues to follow: chromatographic reactions, tracks, faint scents, and a learned knowledge of the species’ habits. Once she punched in, Specialist Heitz would have thirty minutes to tag as many virtual fugitives as she could.

Before Lazuli could so much as repeat the mantra that had sustained her for many years and through several personal crises, which happened to be small equals motivated, a pulsating purple blob blossomed on her visor’s display.

This was most unusual. Purple was usually reserved for live trolls. Perhaps her helmet was glitching. This would not be in the least surprising, as Academy equipment was always bottom of the priority list when the budget was being carved up between departments. Lazuli’s suit was threadbare and ill-fitting, and packed with weapons that hadn’t been standard issue in decades.

She blinked at the purple blob to enlarge it and realised that there was indeed a troll on the beach, albeit a tiny one. The poor fellow was smaller than her, though he did not seem as intimidated by the human world as she was.

I must rescue him, Lazuli told herself. This was undoubtedly the correct action, unless this troll was involved somehow in a live manoeuvre. Lazuli’s angel mentor, who directed the exercise from Haven City, had explicitly and repeatedly ordered her never to poke her nose into an operation.

‘There are two types of fast track, Specialist Heitz,’ the angel had said only that morning. ‘The fast track to the top, and the fast track out the door. Poke your nose into an operation where it doesn’t belong, and guess which track you’ll be on.’

Lazuli didn’t need to guess.

A thought occurred to her: could it be that the coincidental appearance of a troll on this island was her stinkworm?

This was very possible, as LEP instructors were a sneaky bunch.

A specialist’s mettle was often stress-tested by mocking up an emergency and observing how the cadet coped. Rookies referred to this testing as being thrown a stinkworm, because, as every fairy knew, if a person were thrown an actual stinkworm and they mishandled it, there would be an explosive, viscous and foul-smelling outcome. There was a legend in the Academy about how one specialist had been dropped into the crater of an apparently active volcano to see how he would handle the crisis. The specialist in question did not respond with the required fortitude and was now wanding registration chips in the traffic department.

Lazuli had no intention of wanding chips in traffic.

This could be my stinkworm, she thought.

In which case, she should simply observe, as her angel would be keeping a close eye.

Or it could be a genuine operation.

In which case, she should most definitely steer clear, as there would be LEP agents in play.

But there was a third option.

Option C: was it possible that the Fowls were running an operation of their own here? The human Artemis Fowl had a chequered history with the People.

If that were the case, then she should rescue the toy troll, who was perhaps three metres away from two children her facial-recognition software labelled as Myles and Beckett Fowl.

Lazuli hung in the air while she mulled over her options. Her angel had mentioned the name Artemis before the Dalkey Island exercise.

‘If you ever meet Artemis Fowl, he is to be trusted,’ she’d said literally minutes before Lazuli boarded her magma pod. ‘His instructions are to be followed without question.’

But her comrades in the locker room told a different story.

‘That entire family is poison,’ one Recon sprite had told her. ‘I saw some of the sealed files before a mission. That Fowl guy kidnapped one of our captains and made off with the ransom fund. Take it from me, once a human family gets a taste of fairy gold, it’s only a matter of time before they come back for more, so watch out up there.’

Lazuli had no option but to trust her angel, but maybe she would keep a close eye on the twins. Should she do more than that?

Observe, steer clear or engage?

How was a specialist supposed to tell a convincingly staged emergency from an actual one?

All this speculation took Lazuli perhaps three seconds, thanks to her sharp mind. After the third second, the emergency graduated to a full-blown crisis when a shot echoed across the sound and the little troll was sent tumbling with the force of the impact, landing squarely at the rowdy child’s feet. Beckett Fowl immediately grabbed and restrained the toy troll.

This effectively removed Specialist Heitz’s dilemma. It was just as her comrades had foretold: the Fowls were kidnapping a fairy!

An LEP operative’s first responsibility was to protect life, prioritising fairy life, and so now Lazuli was duty-bound and morally obliged to rescue the toy troll.

The prospect both terrified and thrilled her.

The first thing to do was inform her angel of the developing situation, even though radio silence was protocol during exercises.

‘Specialist Heitz to Haven. Priority-one trans-mission …’

If anyone had been on the other end of that transmission, they would have been left curious, because at that moment dozens of flares were launched from the house, and Specialist Heitz was forced to take evasive action to avoid being clipped. She had barely got her rig under control when there came a rumbling series of booms and Lazuli felt a wave of crackles pass through her body. The crackles were not particularly painful, but they did have the effect of shorting out her communicator along with every circuit and sensor in her shimmer suit. Lazuli watched in horror as her own limbs speckled into view.

‘Oh …’ she said, then fell out of the sky.

Not all the way down, fortunately, as Specialist Heitz’s suit launched its back-up operational system, which ran like clockwork because it was clockwork: a complicated hub of sealed gears and cogs ingeniously interlinked in a series of planetary epicyclic mechanisms that fed directly into a motor in Lazuli’s wing mounts.

Lazuli felt the legs of her jumpsuit stiffen and instinctively began to pedal before she hit the earth like an injured bird. The gears were phenomenally efficient, with barely a joule of energy loss thanks to the sealed hub, and so Specialist Heitz was able to reclaim her previous altitude with a steady mid-air pedal. But she was still quite plainly in the visible spectrum, looking for all the world like she was riding an invisible unicycle.

Though Lazuli’s spine had not been compacted by a high-speed impact with Dalkey Island, she still had the problem of how to effectively engage a sniper when she was operating under pedal power. If Lazuli attempted to approach the sniper, he could take potshots at his leisure.

Visibility was the problem.

So become invisible, Heitz.

But how to become invisible without any magic or even an operational shimmer suit?

There was a way, but it was neither foolproof nor field-tested, though it had been tried in somewhat raucous conditions, those being the communal area of the cadets’ locker room – inside lockers 28 and 29, to be precise. Lazuli knew this because she had witnessed the bullying, and lost ten grade points for repeating the experiment on the bully.

Lazuli reached into one of the myriad pockets in her suit and drew out a pressurised pod of chromophoric camouflage filaments held together by reinforced spider silk. The Filabuster, as it was known by LEP operatives, was rarely deployed, and in fact was due to be removed from duty kits in the next few months because of the unpredictability of its range, but now it was the only weapon in Lazuli’s arsenal that was actually of any use, as it had no electronic parts and came pre-primed.

The Filabuster operated on the same system that certain plants employ to disperse their seeds. The fibres inside the dried egg pull against each other to create tension, and when the silken cowl is ruptured the reflective filaments explode with considerable force, creating a visual distortion that can provide enough cover to cause momentary confusion.

But I need more than momentary confusion, Lazuli thought. I need to be invisible.

Which was where the locker-room antics came in. When a hulking demon cadet had forced a tiny pixie into his own locker and then tossed in an armed Filabuster, the pixie had emerged coated in filaments and practically invisible, and also, it turned out later, battered and bruised.

Perhaps this is not a good idea, thought Lazuli. Then she pulled the spider-silk ripcord before she could change her mind. Now there were approximately ten seconds before the silk surrendered to the internal pressure and exploded in a dense fountain of chromophoric filaments that would adjust to the region’s dominant colour, which ought to be the blue-black of the early evening Irish Sea.

‘D’Arvit,’ swore Lazuli in Gnommish, knowing that this experience was going to be, at the very least, quite unpleasant. ‘D’Arvit.’

But what were a few cuts and bruises in the face of a troll’s life?

Specialist Heitz hugged the Filabuster close to her body and went to her happy place, which was the cubicle apartment she’d recently rented on Booshka Avenue that she shared with one single plant and absolutely no people.

‘See you soon, Fern,’ she said, and then the Filabuster exploded with approximately ten times more force than the locker model.

The sensation was more kinetic than Specialist Lane had anticipated, and Lazuli instantly had more respect for the locker pixie who’d borne the torment without complaint. She felt as though she had been dropped into a nest of extremely irritable wasps that were not overly fond of hybrid fairies. The filaments clawed at every millimetre of her suit, more than a few managing to wiggle inside and tear her skin. This laceration was accompanied by a tremendous concussive force, which sent pedalling to the bottom of Lazuli’s list of priorities and sent the pixel herself tumbling to earth, with only the drag of doubledex wings to slow her down.

As she fell, Lazuli had the presence of mind to notice a ragged shroud of Filabuster filaments assemble around the small island, rendering it invisible to anyone outside the field.

Good, she thought. If I survive the fall, the camouflage filaments should hang around long enough to facilitate a toy-troll rescue.

Though perhaps her thoughts were not so lucid. Perhaps they were more as follows: Aaaargh! Sky! Rescue! D’Arvit!

Whichever the case, Specialist Heitz was correct: if she survived – which was a gargantuan if for a fairy without magic – then the Filabuster drape should afford her time to rescue the toy troll.

And it would have afforded her time if left undisturbed. Unfortunately, mere moments later, an army helicopter thundered over Sorrento Point, the downdraught from its rotors scattering the Filabuster curtain to the four winds. And, just as suddenly as Dalkey Island had disappeared, it returned to view.

Specialist Lazuli Heitz hit the earth hard. Technically she did not hit the earth itself, but something perched on top of it. Something soft and slimy that popped like bubblewrap as she sank through its layers.

Lazuli could have no way of knowing that her life had been saved by Myles Fowl’s seaweed fermentation silo. She ploughed her way through several slick levels before coming to a stop in the bottom third of the giant barrel, and in the moment before the seaweed covered her entirely she watched the lead helicopter hover above and noticed a black-clad figure standing right out on the landing skid, her skirt flapping in the rotor-generated wind.

Is that what the humans call a ninja? Lazuli wondered, trying to remember her human studies. But ninja was not the right word. What had come after ninja on the human occupations chart?

Not a ninja, she realised. It’s a nun.

Then the seaweed slid over Lazuli’s small frame, and, because the universe likes its little jokes, this felt almost exactly the same as being submerged in a brass tub of eels.